Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Do you remember the era of the seven-string guitar? Even if you weren’t around for it, you probably have a mental snapshot of what it must have felt like to be young somewhere between 1995 and 9/11 after Kurt Cobain’s death but before irony supposedly flatlined. Every rock band seemed to have one member with unnaturally tinted contacts and another with a bucket hat glued to his head. Girls flashed their midriffs between ultra-low-rise jeans and tiny babydoll shirts. Black Flys sunglasses were everywhere, tongues were stained neon yellow from Surge, and buying a Slurpee before tearing up a 7-Eleven felt like some grand act of suburban rebellion.
Bugland, Jasamine White-Gluz’s first release as No Joy since 2020’s Motherhood,, soaks itself in that exact nostalgia. Plenty of records do this in 2025, riding the wave of rose-tinted fantasies about the supposed freedom and fun of the Clinton years. The difference here is that Bugland knows it’s indulging in a memory. With a name that sounds like something a quirky kindergartner would give a theme park, the album is intentionally self-aware. Its shiny, radio-friendly guitars and swirling pink shoegaze haze aren’t treated like sacred relics they’re malleable, like musical Floam, reshaped into something new. The record fits perfectly into today’s shoegaze revival, yet it also stands apart from the pack. It’s tender and awe-filled, with moments that invite both gasps and tears. But because it wears its love for the past so playfully, Bugland is, more than anything else, a joyride.
The sheer number of charming little touches shouldn’t shock anyone familiar with White-Gluz’s knack for turning nostalgia into fuel. On Motherhood, she mixed in slap bass, jewel-bright ’80s synths, and even brought in Tara McLeod from nü-metal pioneers Kittie to explore the tangled maze of motherhood. For Bugland, she teams up with experimental musician Angel Marcloid (a.k.a. Fire-Toolz) to blow that palette wide open, making Motherhood seem almost restrained by comparison. You could think of it as Imaginal Disk’s older, bolder sibling.
That maximalist approach could easily spiral into chaos, but White-Gluz’s skill as an arranger keeps everything coherent. Her songs build in thick layers, and part of her magic is peeling them back bit by bit. Halfway through the opener “Garbage Dream House,” buried in a fog of synth clouds, glitchy digital scraps, and crunchy Butch Vig-style guitars, she sings with a kind of dreamy detachment. Breakbeats idle lazily, pastel-hued drones hum in the background, and then when a snare snaps everything into focus the track bursts open into something as euphoric as “Ray of Light.” On the title track, riffs are tossed onto the mix like stickers slapped onto a locker, while liquid static and a shuffling drum machine fill the rest of the space.
Elsewhere, White-Gluz keeps stacking more textures, more ambience, more guitar tones until the songs are practically bursting with juice, then lets them spill over in waves of pure pleasure. Even when things dial down a bit, like in “Bather in the Bloodcells,” where tolling notes morph into a kind of alt-rock spin on Madonna’s Paradise Garage days, the air is still heavy with joy and gratitude. That grounding makes the record land somewhere in the territory of the slinky indie-dance hybrids that Curve and Garbage pioneered three decades ago, a lane very few artists have convincingly revisited.
In her solo work, Marcloid often mashes plunky new-age synths imagine the fanciest preset on the priciest keyboard in the oldest mall you know with black-metal screams and smooth Weather Channel jazz, creating sounds that feel both eerily familiar and dusted with the grit of an invented past. Many of the elements she and White-Gluz use are now labeled as kitschy or overly era-specific, from the thick, photorealistic guitar tones to the production styles that fell out of favor during the garage rock and post-punk revival years. But back when these sounds first hit, they were born of total sincerity, attempts to express something real. White-Gluz and Marcloid get that, and they use both their own awareness and the audience’s to give these elements a fresh edge. When “Jelly Meadow Bright” crashes smooth-jazz sax, angelic choral harmonies, frenetic Glassworks-style sequencing, and growling nü-metal guitars together, the moment it blooms into full grandeur is tied to both the raw emotional punch of those sounds and our shared recognition of their “dated” flavor—it’s like the soundtrack to your life flashing before your eyes.
Over the top? Sure. But subtlety doesn’t have a monopoly on artistry, just like going big and being catchy doesn’t automatically make something shallow. Taking in Bugland’s explosion of color and constant surprises feels like smashing open a piñata onto the wild-patterned carpet of a laser tag arena chaotic, yes, but impossible to look away from. As we get older, memories fade, opportunities shrink, and the weight of reality starts to press down. Bugland isn’t pure escapism, but more of a nudge. It says, Remember when it felt good to be completely swept away?
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For as long as we’ve known Taylor Swift, she’s played many roles, the songwriter and the storyteller, the narrator and the main character. In the last two years, she’s become both the tortured poet and the billionaire showgirl. Her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department captured her deepest heartbreak, which unfolded alongside her greatest victories: the record-breaking Eras Tour, her long fight to reclaim her master recordings, and a whirlwind romance with her now-fiancé, Travis Kelce. Never one to take it easy, she began her next project by saying, “I want to be as proud of an album as I am of the Eras Tour, and for the same reasons.”
Swift’s twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, is anything but reserved. She opens with “The Fate of Ophelia,” a love story that lifts her away from heartbreak, not into a fairytale, but out of tragedy. On The Tortured Poets Department, she spent thirty-one songs writing her way through sorrow. Here, she seems to undo it all in just one.
The melancholy that colored her last four records is mostly gone, yet The Life of a Showgirl still feels surprisingly understated. Swift reunites with pop powerhouses Max Martin and Shellback for the first time in eight years, crafting arrangements built around crisp ’70s soft-rock drums and minimalist hip-hop beats reminiscent of Pure Heroine. The songs focus heavily on her voice and lyrics, but they don’t quite capture the lush emotional nuance she found in her collaborations with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner.
Outside of “Ophelia,” the other clear radio contender is “Opalite,” a breezy pop-rock track that recalls Red-era songs like “Message in a Bottle.” The difference is that 2012 Taylor never would have started a love song with lines as biting as, “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash.’”
For the starry-eyed young Taylor, romance used to be the lens through which she saw everything. Now in her mid-thirties, she still portrays love as pure, but her stories come with more complications. The acoustic ballad “Eldest Daughter” begins with her guarded and detached, then gradually opening up as the song unfolds. The narrative works, but it also shows the album’s smaller emotional scope: she gives the same weight to romantic vulnerability as she does to frustrations about the internet.
That’s about as serious as Showgirl gets, in fact, it might be her funniest record yet, depending on how much you’re laughing with her. On “Father Figure,” she playfully references George Michael while poking fun at her feud with Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun, singing, “I can make deals with the devil because my dick’s bigger!” Then there’s “Wood,” her first attempt at disco, which channels The Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” and Diana Ross’ “I’m Coming Out.” It’s a cheeky, joyful track that nods to her fiancé’s prowess both in life and in love. “Wi$h Li$t” is equally over-the-top, think “Royals” rewritten by someone who’s as close to American royalty as you can get, yet its domestic fantasy somehow feels sweet and genuine.
When Swift stops trying to prove anything and simply exists within her music, the magic comes back. “Ruin the Friendship,” like “Betty,” captures the innocence of a teenage crush that lingers into adulthood. “Wilted corsage dangles from my wrist / Over his shoulder I catch a glimpse,” she sings, as memories of missed chances fade into a funeral decades later. Then, in the present, she mourns what could’ve been: “It was not convenient, no / But I whispered at the grave / ‘Should’ve kissed you anyway.’” Swift’s greatest gift, the one at the heart of the Eras Tour, has always been her ability to make a song feel like a lived memory, no matter how many times you hear it.
But by the next track, “Actually Romantic,” she’s back in character, reviving her “Blank Space” persona to seemingly take aim at Charli XCX. Over a grungy Pixies/Weezer-inspired beat, she taunts, “It sounded nasty but it feels like you’re flirting with me / I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it / It’s kind of making me… wet!” The jab feels random, especially given the references to Charli’s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” the “CANCELLED!” lyrics on this album, and their supposed reconciliation on the “Girl, So Confusing” remix. Maybe she wrote it just to amuse herself.
The closing title track nearly ties everything together. Featuring Sabrina Carpenter, Swift tells the story of an aging showgirl named Kitty who warns her about the ruthless world of fame. By the song’s end, Taylor flips the narrative, claiming her own power: “I’m immortal now, baby dolls!” She’s still marked by the battles she’s fought, but she didn’t have to lose herself to win, and she hasn’t shut the door on those who come after her. Like Elizabeth Taylor, the world might gossip about her personal life, but history will remember her career, exactly as she intended.
When Michael Jackson passed away, TIME Magazine wrote, “In the theater of celebrity tragedy, each play has three acts.” Having escaped Ophelia’s fate, Taylor Swift now finds herself in her fifth. She’s still a fascinating main character, though her focus has shifted to life under the microscope of social media. Meanwhile, outside her kingdom, the world continues to face crises, from climate change to political unrest and humanitarian disasters.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking escape, but the best pop music makes personal emotion feel like everything is at stake. Speak Now, Reputation, Folklore, her most powerful albums transformed her pain into something universal. For the first time, The Life of a Showgirl finds Taylor Swift not growing through love, but resting comfortably within it.
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